I would prefer to believe that my alcoholism caused my second divorce. I had been more than a year sober when I started having the affair that ended my second marriage. Anyone who has been sober for a while will tell you not to make major changes in your relationships in the first few years of sobriety, and that’s good advice. But the same person will also tell you that a lot of relationships end when one or both people quit drinking. The nasty truth is, I would never have married my second wife if I hadn’t been drunk all the time, and after a year of sobriety (she kept on drinking at first, and then got sober several years later), we both realized that we hadn’t enjoyed each other’s company in a long time.

I remember one afternoon around this time, at a Starbuck’s in New York, my second wife and I were having a fight over the phone—she was back in Kansas City—and when I got off the phone an attractive woman with a heavy Swedish or Danish accent leaned over and asked me: “Are you alright? Would you like to talk about it?” I told her, “I’m great, thank you.” I was sad and angry but I was also enormously relieved. I walked up a side street in NewYork, I was on the Lower East Side, and shouted, as loud as I could: “I’m free!I’m free!”

I was not free. That was eight years ago, and just a few
weeks ago I was arguing with my ex-wife over the phone—this time, about our
thirteen-year-old and a problem she’s having with school—and I don’t know how
many times I have counted out the years until my daughters graduate from high
school and start college, with the thought that, at last, their mother and I
will have a little more distance and liberty. She must feel the same way.

I have since remarried, and my wife Amie pointed out the
other day: “It’s funny, externally nothing changes when the girls have a
problem. But a small thing goes wrong and everything gets out of whack.” And
this leads me back to the question of my alcoholism, my second divorce (if
you’re counting and feeling confused, I’ve been divorced twice and married
three times) and the question of freedom. Not so very much changed in my life
when I got sober: I had the same wife, the same children, the same job, the
same schedule, the same work habits. Yes, I no longer spent the late afternoon
and early evening hours secretly drinking; instead, at that time, I was in AA
meetings or cooking or taking long walks with my youngest child in her baby
sling. But even my evening secret drinking hours were mostly spent doing much
the same things I’d done before. What did change was my attitude towards the
hours of my day. Which gets me to thinking about what does it mean to talk
about being free, or of the feeling of increasing liberty.

Now before I make it sound triumphant, which it was not—likemany other alcoholics, during my first two years of sobriety I was depressed,often immobile with depression—I want to say that the weird thing was that mysuffering turned out be not exactly a bad thing. Of course no one really wantsto suffer, and given the choice between suffering and not suffering, I like anyother feeling person would be pain-free. I also want to avoid causing sufferingto others.

Schopenhauer writes: “Unless suffering
is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of
its aim…. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be
something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.”

So, if we’re all bound to suffer, should I simply give up?
For Schopenhauer, I can do at least two things. The first is like what an
alcoholic does: I can acknowledge the fact of my suffering. Because suffering
multiplies when I’m in denial about suffering. I resent my suffering, and I lose
the ability to discriminate between the causes of my suffering, which plunges
me deeper into the mess.

But why shouldn’t I be able to avoid the consciousness of my
suffering throughout my life and just be blissful in my ignorance? For
Schopenhauer (as for any addict—and Schopenhauer thinks we’re all addicts,
hooked on desire itself) ignoring the situation aggravates the problem. On this
view, life is like walking along an extremely brambly path. If I know what I’m
doing, and I’m very, very careful, I am still going to be stuck with plenty of
thorns. But if I pretend it’s not a brambly path and hope that bravado and
stubbornness will carry me through, I am going to tear yourself to shreds. I
won’t eliminate suffering through recognizing it for what it is, but I can
avoid unnecessary suffering. “Every beast is trained by blows,” as Heraclitus
says: I can at least learn from my mistakes. If I know my desires will be
frustrated, I might desire a little less.

The second thing I can do, on Schopenhauer’s account, is not
try to escape suffering. A lot of my suffering is the pain of frustration or
disappointment: I expect life to reward my efforts in ways that it won’t; I
expect pleasure, at last, and then find pain once again; I expect tomorrow to be
better than yesterday, and am confused and discouraged when it isn’t. These are
unnecessary pains caused by uninformed, unnecessary beliefs about life. Like
his fan Albert Camus, Schopenhauer thinks that part of Sisyphus’s pain of
rolling his boulder up the mountain is caused by the belief that, this time,
the boulder will actually stay at the summit. If he knows it’s going to roll
back down again, that extra suffering created by expectation vanishes.

To be perfectly blunt: I drank to stop suffering. But if I’m
no longer trying to fight suffering…well, that changes my perspective.

So the suffering of my divorce or of my failures as a
father? I can try to be a better husband, but marriage is going to be hard. I
can try to be the best dad I know how to be, but my kids are going to have
problems. Of course I try to do better in whatever little ways I can find for
practical improvement—and maybe I am slowly learning a few tricks. But I should
also let myself accept that if life doesn’t kick me one way, it will find
another.

As an addict this is a lot like letting go of the idea thatI have control of my own life. As a person who has wrestled with depression, this is accepting that I will have another significant episode of depression in my life. The idea of “letting go”—Sisyphus letting go of his rock—is not a trivial liberation. If I am not in control of my suffering anymore, I can stop blaming myself for my suffering. If I no longer think that every time I suffer I am doing something wrong, then I am free from the idea that there is a right way. Suddenly, I can live again.

REMEMBER THIS!

I am suffering, but I don’t have to fight it.

I’m suffering, but so is everyone else, and I don’t have to feel bad about it.

I’m suffering, but I don’t have to be afraid of suffering. I’ve always suffered and I can handle it just fine.

I’m free to just let go of struggling against suffering. If I do, I actually suffer a lot less.

Clancy Martin is Story Editor of The Small Bow. He’s written about his alcoholism and philosophy for many other publications, including this amazing story for Harper’s, which you should read every single day if you’re a recovering drunk.